If you value your privacy, remove this Microsoft app quickly
Wallpaper apps seem to be more controversial than ever. Recently, YouTuber Marques Brownlee was the one who posted a wallpaper app that ran on a ridiculously inflated $50 per year subscription, and now it’s Microsoft’s turn.
Microsoft has just released a new wallpaper app for Windows called Bing Wallpaper. It includes tons of images that you can use to decorate your computer's desktop, and it's completely free.
The images are of high quality and you don’t have to pay anything. So what’s the problem? You already know the saying “when the product is free, the product is you,” and here it seems that’s exactly what’s happening with Microsoft’s app.
As engineer Rafael Rivera discovered, once you install the app, Bing Visual Search (a tool similar to Google Lens that allows you to analyze the content of web pages you visit in the browser) is also installed. But what's even more dangerous is that Bing Wallpaper can also decrypt cookies for Chrome, Firefox and Edge.
In short, according to Rivera, installing Bing Wallpaper represents a more than significant loss of privacy, leaving the door open for the app to send browsing data to Microsoft without the user having full knowledge of it.
As if that wasn't enough, when you close your trusted browser, Bing Wallpaper reopens it and shows you a message to activate Microsoft's search engine in the browser.
Microsoft has been using unconventional techniques for years to get its apps to as many users as possible in the Windows environment. Although in this case, it seems to have gone too far with an app that should be completely harmless in terms of privacy.
If you want to know about this application, we have cracked it a few days ago and it is recommended to remove it: Microsoft launches an application in the Windows Store to change the backgrounds on your computer to wonderful backgrounds.. You can download it for free